For our first trip from Saint Louis to California in 1966
I had bought a used 1960 Chevy Corvair. I bought it off one of those car lots
that sell cheap and less than top notch vehicles. We were dirt poor and the car
was just $300 and I liked it. The first thing that went wrong on the second day
I had it was the starter solenoid. I fixed that without much trouble. The car
started making an unusual sound a week later, two days before we were due to
leave for the golden state. A mechanic friend told me it was the head gasket. It
was too late to repair that, so off we went on a wing and a prayer. We were
just on the first day of the trip when I discovered that when I hit a bump in
the road, the front end started shimmying and I would have to slow down and
sometimes come to a full stop to end the shimmy. On the second day traveling
through the Petrified Forest the fan belt had stretched and came loose, not a
good thing on an air cooled engine. I did not have any tools, but through sheer
force I managed to get it back loosely on the guide pulleys and limp into a
Western Auto store to buy a new belt and a pair of wrenches to replace the
belt. I still have those wrenches and whenever I see them I think of that day. On
the third day we passed through Flagstaff and I knew I was getting low on gas,
but the car got 20 miles per gallon and we were about 10 miles out of Williams
Arizona where we planned to stay the night. The car manual stated it had a ten
gallon tank and a quick calculation showed with 180 miles traveled I had enough
gas to go 20 more miles. We were two miles out of Williams when the car started
surging as it was running out of gas. I stomped on the accelerator to increase
speed so when the gas was completely gone I would still be able to throw the
car into neutral and glide for a way. We were headed up a grade when the engine
quit. I threw it into neutral and hoped to get over the hump. The car slowed to
10 mph as we crested the hill. We were still a mile out of Williams, but it was
all downhill. We rolled into a gas station just as the owner was turning out
the lights to go home. He was kind enough to turn the pumps back on and I
filled the tank right up to the top of the fill pipe. It took just 9.5 gallons;
thank you General Motors for being so exact on your specifications. There was a
motel right across the street from the gas station so we got a room for the
night. I jumped into the shower and just got lathered up when the hot water
turned to ice cubes. It took me an hour to warm back up after that. The fourth
day saw us limping into Glendale where my cousin lived. The head gasket had
gotten so bad I could not keep up with the traffic on the freeway and we were
nearly deaf from listening to all the honking horns as speedy drivers passed us
by and laid on those horns to display their dissatisfaction with my slow
driving. My cousin’s husband was a front-end mechanic at a Chevy garage and he
kindly repaired the bad tie rod on the Corvair and he had a friend who worked independently
and he replaced the head gasket and the cylinder that had burned out due to the
faulty gasket. It was a rough trip, but after the many repairs the old Corvair
was like a brand new buggy.
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